There are two key priorities for South Africa as the electricity crisis, which first reared its head all the way back in November 2005, deepens and looks poised to endure for some time as a result of major delays at the Medupi, Kusile and Ingula projects.

The most urgent, and the most painful, relates to arresting the decline in the performance of Eskom’s coal-fired power stations, where the deterioration since 2010 has been not only dramatic, but also rapid.

In a slide released as part of a presentation on the state of the power system in December, Eskom outlined the extent of the regression. The utility showed that, during its 2010 financial year, the capacity unavailable as a result of breakdowns stood at just over 2 000 MW. The performance worsened modestly to around 2 500 MW in the following financial year. But, by the 2014 financial year, breakdowns had surged to well over 5 000 MW and the trend has persisted.

During the last few months, it has been quite normal for Eskom to report unplanned outages of between 6 000 MW and 11 000 MW. For this reason, despite various capacity expansion programmes that have taken place since 2006, during which more than 6 000 MW has been added, there is, in reality, less capacity available today than was the case ahead of the multibillion-rand build programme.

So, while Eskom may speak of a theoretical capacity of around 42 000 MW, the combination of unplanned loses of ongoing maintenance has meant that it has been unable to meet demand of only around 30 000 MW on a number of summer days since the coal-silo collapse at Majuba on November 1 last year.

The remedy lies in diligently pressing ahead with maintenance in a zero-tolerance-type manner, which, as mentioned earlier, is going to be accompanied by a great deal of pain in the form of ongoing load- shedding.

At the moment, this involves putting out a lot of maintenance fires simply to lay the platform for a more proactive maintenance philosophy. It is understood that this is a major focus of the so-called war room, where there is an eagerness to ensure that the energy availability factor recovers from around 70% to better than 80%. This intervention alone will go a long way towards stabilising the system, particularly given that demand has been flat to falling for some years now.

The other key priority relates to accelerating programmes that can help reduce demand in the near term. These have been on the cards for a number of years, but implementation has been patchy, to say the least.

It is gratifying to note that a request for information has been released to tease out possible demand-response initiatives. However, there are lingering concerns about programme administration and funding, which will need to be sorted out post-haste.

The idea of the war room is for the supply side to receive a boost from greater power station reliability, while the demand response and energy efficiency programmes help reduce or shift load. Without serious progress in both areas, the load-shedding risk will persist for many months, if not years (some say up to five years), to come.